Novel Writing: Symbolic Thinking
Hampered this past week by a bad cold, I’ve made only minimal progress in National Novel Writing Month (you can see my previous thoughts on this year’s NaNoWriMo here, here, here, and here). Still, a few things have become clear to me about the shape of my story; I seem to be writing, not a two-book story, but a four-book saga. Which is all right, since the idea of the story, Modred finding his way at the court of Arthur and beyond, was always meant to divide into four units; only now it seems those units are going to be longer than I’d expected.
But what’s surprising me so far is not how the material I expected to find in the story is arranging itself, but how unpredictable some of that material is. How symbols are choosing themselves, and manifesting in strange ways. And in ways of which I’m only vaguely conscious.
“Symbol” is in many ways a difficult word. What’s a symbol? The way I think of it, it’s an image in a story that means more than itself; specifically, an image that means more than can be explained. It’s an allusive image; a symbol typically seems to mean more than one thing, and usually gains resonance by being part of more than one symbol-system, whether the author was conscious of it or not. So a symbol can be defined as an image whose significance can be read many ways, but which can never be wholly captured by a non-narrative paraphrase.
On the heels of 
